Children’s Hospital to host Arts for Healing Festival

9/19/13 - Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital celebrates the 10th anniversary of its Arts for Healing program October 2-6 with a festival featuring the music, theater, video and visual art of patients, healthcare providers and artists.

The Arts for Healing Festival empowers our pediatric patients to educate others about living with illness and showcases the arts as an essential component of compassionate healthcare. The public is invited to experience and create art through events co-hosted by the Children's Hospital and Collective Consciousness Theatre.

Most events are open to the public and free of charge including a musical play written by young adults with sickle cell disease; gallery of patients' visual art; presentation by poet Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez; Yale Humanities in Medicine Student Writers presentation; and Yale Music in Medicine performance.

A highlight of the festival is an award-winning hip-hop play entitled "How to Break" about a hospitalized teenage break dancer redefining what it means to be "ill." Tickets for this event may be purchased in advance at www.socialchangetheatre.org or at the door.

Yale-New Haven Hospital is a nationally recognized, 1,541-bed, not-for-profit hospital serving as the primary teaching hospital for the Yale School of Medicine. Yale-New Haven was founded as the fourth voluntary hospital in the U.S. in 1826. Today, the hospital's two New Haven-based inpatient campuses include Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital, Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital and Smilow Cancer Hospital. YNHH has a combined medical staff of about 4,500 university and community physicians practicing in more than 100 specialties. YNHH's York Street campus and associated ambulatory sites are Magnet-designated by the American Nurses Credentialing Center.